Shadows
by lalalei
Summary: Seven were taken, but one was left behind. The year and a half Tristan's friends were missing brought with it a lifetime of regret, fear, and mind games. Based on Bellamy-Taft's fanfic "Glass" and will make the most sense if you read that first.


The first day after is a blur of questions. _When did you see them last? Is there a reason you didn't make the convention? Do you have any idea who could have done this?_

Tristan Taylor regrets that his answer for the third question is an alarmingly long list of enemies. Off the top of his head, there's Kaiba from back in his Death-T days, Shadi, Pegasus—Tristan's suspicious of him right off the bat since it was _his_ convention and all—and Marik, or at least what's left of his Ghouls, Yami Bakura, Bandit Keith, Weevil Underwood, and who knows _how_ many bitter duelists Yugi or Joey beat. But for the sake of brevity, he tells them he suspects Pegasus and why he does so. It wouldn't be the first time he's kidnapped someone.

His hope for a quick resolution—he can almost hear it, 'I'm so sorry, Yugi-boy, I certainly didn't _mean_ to make you go missing'—is dashed when Pegasus claims no knowledge of what happened, vows to spare no expense in finding them, and they believe every word. The convention footage, on the news and online, is a boon. Tristan records a copy and saves it, scanning for clues, but comes up distressingly empty.

If Pegasus is telling the truth, he thinks, maybe he'll come through. If he's lying—and Tristan _hopes_ his hunch was wrong—he planned it far too well to be detected.

As hours turn to days and days turn into weeks, Tristan has a sinking feeling the latter is correct.

* * *

In the morning, Tristan sets the phone at his bedside and waits. Every phone call makes his heart race that something, _anything_ , will be found, but on the best days nothing changes, and on the worst there's setbacks and dead ends. There are no neutral days, not when living is a nightmare.

In the afternoon, Domino is abuzz with activity and rumors. Some kids swear they were the last ones to see Yugi or Kaiba before they disappeared, hardly sparing a thought for Joey, or Tea, or Ryou, or Mokuba. Duke's status as an apparent outlier is dissected at first, but nothing comes of it in the end. Dungeon Dice Monsters fades into the background, just a small subset of Industrial Illusions' earnings, and the publicity from KaibaCorp's acquisition is enough to write it off as a footnote.

In the evening, Pegasus is on TV again. Not live, of course, but through a phone interview, a prerecorded broadcast, his smiles as fake as Funny Bunny's. Is Tristan the only one who sees—or _cares_ to see—behind the mask? They all eat it up, his sympathies, promises, and lies. It _has_ to be lies; if he were innocent he couldn't smile so well. The Eye had picked his brain apart back on Duelist Kingdom, and he wonders if part of the mind-reading magic stayed with him. He glares at the screen with a fury he's never known before.

But Tristan can't go against Pegasus on a hunch alone. He knows this, he knows _Pegasus_ knows this, and he hates, _hates_ , that doing nothing could be the safest option. If Pegasus does have his friends, and he's sure he does, approaching him at all with any suspicion would incur his wrath upon them, and Tristan would be to blame.

He blames himself anyway, for switching tickets with Duke.

In the night Tristan dreams of darkness and faded photographs, the faces too blurred to distinguish between them.

* * *

Most of his days are spent investigating, contacting Mai, Rex, Mako, anyone who might know anything. One day a Ghoul contacts him instead, leaving him with a splitting headache and a concussion before spitting that _that_ was meant for Yugi. Tristan takes the attack in stride, but a small, desperate part of him wishes the punk had more info to give.

The Ishtars visit to offer their support. He thanks them for their help, but his second response is to curse Ishizu for not telling them. _If_ she knew at all. Maybe, Tristan thinks, Kaiba was right after all and there is no such thing as destiny.

If destiny was real, how could anyone be destined for this?

* * *

Six months go by and the search is called off. It hits him in the stomach like a betrayal, _worse_ than a betrayal. It's an admission of failure, and Tristan cannot abide his friends just _vanishing_. He plunges back into it, obsessively, frantically, searching for what isn't there. If it hadn't been found then, why would now be any different? Wasn't that the definition of insanity, to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result? He wasn't sure the first time he heard the phrase, but now Tristan thinks it might be the sanest thing of all.

He hates how things have gone back to normal in the city. Ryou's father has packed up and left, and while Tristan gives him credit for sticking it out this long a much more volatile part of him demands an explanation. How _dare_ he give up, even as others around him threw up their hands in surrender. Isn't that the _point_ of being a father, to be there for your son, to keep him from harm? When Mr. Bakura says his son's been chasing ghosts for years and he may as well let him, Tristan isn't surprised at all, just disappointed.

He briefly considers his offer to get out of the city, to see the world, but the thought of exploring tombs and valleys of the dead fills his lungs with ash, and Tristan can barely choke out a refusal before going home to be sick.

* * *

In his dreams they are here one moment and gone the next, the shadows swallowing them up and leaving no trace. A quick disappearance, clean and final all in the time it takes him to blink. He calls and calls, but no matter how he shouts Tristan's own voice echoes back. No matter where he goes all he sees are shadows, and no matter how far he runs he ends up in the same spot by the end of things.

Tristan hates the reality of those dreams.

* * *

If not for his dog, Tristan wouldn't stay at home. He'd scour the world to find them, cover every inch of the globe if need be, and never dwell on a future that's stalled before it could even start. After the first few weeks he'd quit school, with his parents and sister supportive but not _understanding_ —not in the way he needed them to be. Lucky's unconditional love is a band-aid on a hemorrhage, but he's the reason he stayed, and sometimes, crying into his fur, he feels things might be okay before reality sets in. (His parents had confiscated his air rifle, and he can't blame them.)

He visits Joey's apartment gingerly, afraid that treading too much will make everything crumble. If there's one positive to this mess it's that Mr. Wheeler cut back on drinking, at least long enough to care a while before falling back into a stupor. If he were allowed a drink now, Tristan might not refuse. He understands the mindset that would drive it, if not the means, and where there once was hatred and fear pity fills his heart. Serenity has had it even worse—she's hit her teen years, growing up before his eyes, and her big brother is nowhere to be found. Joey would be proud to see her so confident and tall, and he catches himself on the _would be_.

He visits Ryou's apartment, now haunted in every sense of the word. The mail piles up, and he collects it when no one else cares to, stowing it alongside Ryou's letters to his sister. He read them once, searching for potential clues, and hated his invasion of privacy at the same time as he relished anything connecting him to his friends. Tristan is comfortable in hypocrisy if it can help them and quell his own mind. Once, he wrote to Amane too, begging her for help from beyond the grave. He wonders if she helped keep him sane, and also wonders whether it would be mercy or punishment for letting her brother vanish into mist.

He visits KaibaCorp's old building, now a proud part of Industrial Illusions, and he'll never get used to the Toon Blue-Eyes sitting across from the real deal, a mockery of its inspiration. Tristan gets the feeling it's a joke in more ways than one. Roland is overworked, and while Tristan doesn't understand the ins and outs of the workload he tries his best to help when he can. It reminds him of when Yugi visited Kaiba every day after the Mind Crush, and he wishes that there were someone for him to visit for six months every day. If he got them back he'd never let them out of his sight.

When Tristan is feeling adventurous he visits the game shop. Solomon Muto puts on a brave façade, but around Tristan he lets it falter, and the old man curses the Puzzle, curses Pegasus, curses anyone and anything that could be connected to his grandson and the Pharaoh's disappearance, and anyone who couldn't be connected. They had tried working with Rebecca and Arthur, but even her hacking and networking skills had turned up nothing but dead ends. Any leads that seemed promising evaporated or never existed at all, and Tristan wonders how long it will be before this is his new normal.

It reminds him of that movie _The Neverending Story_ , and the Nothing—not just airspace, not just emptiness, but the uncaring, all-devouring void, pure despair that nothing could fight against for long. Only imagination defeated it, and Tristan's imagination is lost to wild hopes, impossible delusions that maybe, one day, he'll wake up and it will all be a dream.

How long can he really fight against this _nothing_ , before giving in?

* * *

A year passes and he can feel his resolve beginning to crack, surely as he marks the date on the calendar, the anniversary of the _event_ looming over all else. The more he tries to deny it the more he can't stop thinking about it. What if this is _it_? What if he'll never see them again, not even in dreams and memories and recordings? What if he, Tristan Taylor, will never know closure one way or another?

Serenity once said it was almost easier to pretend Joey was dead because the thought of him being alive and gone forever hurt more. He thought he understood her at the time, but he knows he never understood her at all.

Now, though, he does.

* * *

He loses himself in games, dangerous games. Ryou's occult boards and pentagrams and summoning circles turn up nothing, and for the first time Tristan considers what made Bandit Keith play Russian Roulette with his life on the line. Even now he won't go that far, but the thought of games invigorates his brain some. He knows what he'd do, if it were up to him.

If he were good at games like Yugi or Joey he'd demand ransom from the shadows. If he had connections like Kaiba or Duke, passions like Tea or Ryou, hope for the future like Mokuba, the little brat, Tristan would never give up. He'd march into the Shadow Realm, to the maw of Dartz's Leviathan, to wherever Pegasus lay, if it meant he could save them.

If he'd known—if he'd _known_ , even for an instant—he could have done something.

But he didn't know, couldn't have known, and all he has are shadows.

* * *

When they finally do come back, Tristan doesn't believe it.


End file.
